It’s the Lutris version shipped with 22.04, which by today’s standards is definitely ancient. Because I’m not generally a Flatpak fan for stuff that requires larger packages or dependencies, I went directly to the Lutris PPA. And because I’m running KDE Neon, I had to work around the annoying libpoppler dependency issue that’s always plagued Wine on Neon.

Older packages, but not too old, generally provide better stability. Problems can also come from packages being too new and not having all the standout issues worked out of them.

In addition to the perception that you have to be “good at computers” (aka a programmer) to use Linux, in my experience a lot of Linux media outlets (websites, YT channels, podcasts, etc) tend to be heavy on advanced features and tools without much explanation in layman’s terms and tend to be geared towards an IT professional/hobbyist audience, which can reinforce that stereotype among those (like me) who are not.

IMO the title of “worst computer tech company” is essentially a tie between MS and Google right now, with the two constantly one-upping the other back and forth on stupid ideas and corporate practices.

Advertising costs money to produce, and the vast majority of paid Linux distro users, such as Red Hat, SUSE, etc., are business/enterprise users, who usually wouldn’t rely on advertising through TV, YouTube, and so on to find enterprise computing solutions. It would be a disconnect between the ad platform and the primary target market.

When I had to worry about that,I dual-booted. It’s the simplest solution. I don’t really play multiplayer PC games anyway, and multiplayer anti-cheat is 90%+ of the reason games won’t run on Linux nowadays with the advancements made to Proton, so I don’t really have that problem anymore and I haven’t had any Windows on my system in a few years.

Really, this seems to be the best way to spread Linux adoption to me. I would bet that Linux got at least a good few users from the Steam Deck coming with it pre-installed. Big way to show people that for most things the average user doesn’t need to go into the command line to use their system for what they need as well. Of course, continued improvement in the software included in the most popular distros would really boost Linux adoption as well. I’ve seen plenty of people say they’d make the switch - if only they could use MS Office or Adobe software on it. Alternatives like LibreOffice, Thunderbird, Kdenlive and the GIMP have come a LONG way since I first made the switch around 2009, but especially the Adobe software still outclasses the competition when it comes to features. MS Office isn’t as hard to let go of, especially since you can still use Office 365 Online on Linux and LibreOffice is closer to having all the OOTB features of MS Office than the other programs are to Adobe, but you have to convince people to give it a try first and a lot of employers still require MS Office for work.

I will also say, though, that it was only due to Windows Vista otherwise bricking my laptop back then that I even made the switch. I’d heard of this mysterious OS named Ubuntu so I thought I’d give it a try to save my laptop before I bought a new one, especially since I was living abroad at the time and didn’t want to deal with the hassle of buying a computer with a foreign language version of Windows on it. So I had a friend burn me a copy of Ubuntu 8.10, it worked like a charm, and I only ever since ran Windows at home when dual-booting for a couple years for gaming purposes before Proton became a thing. I didn’t even know Ubuntu was Linux until I’d installed it and started learning how to use it in earnest. Really showed me how even then Linux wasn’t so difficult to use for the average computer user.

It seems to me to be mainly from people who are dedicated to the Unix philosophy that programs should do only one thing, and do it well. Tying everything up into systemd doesn’t follow that. I don’t care either, and I don’t mind systemd, but some people care about it enough to throw paragraphs of hate on it wherever it’s mentioned online. And apparently it’s “bloat”, and to some " bloat" is worse than the devil himself.

Getting packages from a spider web of repos then not untangling the web before upgrading from one LTS release to another. Ended up with an unfixable problem with essential packages and dependency versions and had to do a fresh reinstall instead. Fortunately I backed up my files first so I didn’t lose anything important.

I used it a few times. Essentially having a one-click scan was nice, but I could never get it to properly update the virus definitions. Now I just run clamd, freshclam and clamonacc at startup. Uses a ton of RAM but then I don’t have to worry about actually doing anything beyond that.

I’ve seen numerous games in my library that were formerly native switch over to supporting Proton and abandoning the native port. I get that it cuts down on needed time and effort to maintain and we can still play on Proton, but I would really prefer native if there is the opportunity.

Thanks for fixing the issue with Discover not launching! That was my last major issue with Plasma 6. Working great now! 👍

Well, the first place to go would be the system repos unless said repos only offer the flatpak version. Then if only the flatpak is in the repos go to the website.

Still waiting to even be able to open Discover in Neon. Once that issue is fixed, all my issues with it will finally be covered!

I DON’T HAVE A PROBLEM buys 3 more Thinkpads on eBay

I used Tumbleweed for about half a year 1-2 years ago. Version/dependency hell primarily between the main distro repos and Packman (the repo most multimedia drivers are installed from) was my main issue with it. You could expect either the main distros or Packman to break something between the two about once a month and prevent updates for a few days while the other side caught up. Got annoying, but those things can happen pretty easily on a rolling release.

I’ve looked at the list. The only model that could give me what I’m looking for (5G, actually familiar to US-based carriers and repair shops) is the Pixel. I understand it’s not all the fault of the /e/OS devs since there’s factors like many bootloaders not being unlockable on US phones or other hardware complications, but I do get the feeling that the North American market does tend to be an afterthought. From what I can see, a majority of the list is either only available in Europe or will only work with very few carriers here, with lack of 5G capability being a big setback for carrier compatibility. That 5G requirement for many carriers really does hurt European based phone tech compatibility over here quite a bit.

The people behind Murena are also the devs of /e/OS, a de-Googled Android OS that they also sell phones they pre-load it on. My one critique of it so far, owning one of the phones, is that I wish they would work on making it compatible with more well-known phone models available outside Europe. They sold this model I’m using, the Murena One (some Chinese OEM they slapped their name on), here in the US through their website, but I had to run around for two days trying to find a carrier whose service would work on it (or who would even try - eventually T-Mobile worked, the European-based carrier, what a surprise…) and I can’t get anyone to do repairs on it because it’s not one of the well-known brands. The case they gave me for it is essentially purely cosmetic, and only a week or so into owning it, I dropped it at a restaurant and it got a huge area of dead pixels at the bottom of the screen that nobody will fix because they can’t get a new screen for it. If I could install /e/OS myself on more than just the Google Pixel (paying Google to not have to use Android, fun…) that would be great and solve my problems.

Good to see a lot of stuff getting done, but I REALLY wish they would work on fixing their update methods on Neon. Discover still won’t open, and I can’t use pkcon because of a dependency issue with kio-extras5 that I don’t know how to fix (rather than install anything, pkcon just exits with a fatal error if it notices a problem with any package it would update… Leaving a backlog of other packages that could have been updated otherwise 😑). I can only use apt full-upgrade at this point. If someone at least knows how to fix the kio-extras5 issue, that would be great.

<Or are we just presuming we’re all immune from the bad guys targeting Windows?>

Yes, I find that does tend to be the attitude among most Linux articles/videos/etc I see on the subject. There’s some truth to it, in that from what I understand Linux is immune to much of it, but it’s not entirely true. Malware for Linux does exist, so IMO people should not be as complacent about malware as many seem to be, but the community based open-source nature of most Linux software helps mitigate it SOMEWHAT (NOT entirely, because it’s dependent on trusting the community to both want to defend against it and have the skill to do so). Unlike Windows malware defense (to a degree, Windows patches have gotten leagues better than in the past), the primary way Linux stops malware is removing vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. It’s another reason you won’t see nearly as much Linux malware showing up as on Windows: it can’t spread if there’s no exploit to spread through. I do still run Clam and a firewall primarily for my own peace of mind because on my system aside from Clamd using a crap-ton of RAM they don’t really slow it down to a visible degree. Long story short, Linux malware is indeed much rarer than Windows malware, but it does exist and I’m not keen on Linux media people giving the impression that security isn’t something to watch for with Linux for the average user.